THE SECOND DRAWING I made for Doctor François was a portrait of Mademba, my friend, my more-than-brother. This drawing was less beautiful. Not because it was less successful, but because Mademba was ugly. I still think so, even if it isn’t completely true, because, despite the fact that death now separates us, the history of our teasing survives between us. But if Mademba wasn’t as beautiful as I am on the outside, inside he was more so.
When my mother left and didn’t come back, Mademba took me in. He took me by the hand and led me into his parents’ compound. My move into Mademba’s house happened slowly, over time. I slept there one night, then two in a row, then three. God’s truth, my installment in Mademba Diop’s family took place gradually. I no longer had my maman. Mademba, who felt my pain more than anyone else in Gandiol, wanted his maman to adopt me. Mademba took me by the hand and led me to Aminata Sarr: he put my hand into his mother’s and said, “I want Alfa Ndiaye to live with us, I want you to become his maman.” My father’s other wives weren’t mean, they were even nice to me, especially the first one, Ndiaga and Saliou’s mother. But despite that, I gradually left my family to join Mademba’s. My father, the old man, accepted it without a word. He said “yes” to Aminata Sarr, Mademba’s mother, when she asked to adopt me. Every year during the Tabaski Festival, my father even asked his first wife, Aïda Mbengue, to give the best part of the sacrificial sheep to Aminata Sarr. He ended up giving an entire sacrificial sheep to Mademba’s family. My father, the old man, could no longer look at me without wanting to cry. I knew, I understood that I resembled his Penndo too much.
Gradually the sadness left, gradually Aminata Sarr and Mademba, aided by the passage of time, made me forget the gnawing pain. At first, Mademba and I would go off to play in the brush, always heading north. He and I knew, between ourselves, we understood why. But we kept our hopes quiet, that we would be the first to see my mother, Yoro Ba, his five sons, and their herd. What we told Aminata Sarr about our daylong expeditions to the north was that they were to catch palm rats in traps, or to hunt turtledoves with slingshots. She would give us her blessing and a few provisions, three pinches of salt and a flask of cold water. And whenever we caught palm rats or turtledoves and roasted them—after gutting, plucking, or butchering them—staked on dry branches, we would forget my mother, her father, her five brothers, and their herd. Watching the orange flames of our small fire sizzle, reanimated from time to time by fat oozing from the crackling flesh of our haul from the brush, we were no longer thinking about the pain of absence that wrung our guts, but of the hunger that wrung them just as much. We stopped dreaming that by some incredible miracle Penndo had escaped her Moorish captors, that she had reunited in Walaldé with her father, her five brothers, and their herd, and that they would return together to Gandiol. At that moment, so close to her kidnapping, the only way I knew to surmount the irreversible absence of my mother was by hunting and cooking palm rats and turtledoves with Mademba, my more-than-brother.
We grew up, gradually, Mademba and I. And gradually we stopped taking the road north from Gandiol to wait for Penndo to return. At fifteen, we were circumcised on the same day. We were initiated into the secrets of adulthood by the same village elder. He explained to us how to conduct ourselves. The greatest secret he taught us was that it isn’t the man who controls events but events that control the man. Any event that surprises a man has already been experienced by other men before him. The effects of all human possibilities have already been felt. Nothing that might happen to us here, as terrible or as felicitous as it might seem, is new. But what we experience is always new because every man is unique, the way every leaf and every tree is unique. Men share with each other the same lifeblood, but each feeds himself from it differently. Even if the new isn’t really new, it’s always new for those who, ceaselessly, wash up on the world’s shores, generation after generation, wave after wave. So, in order to find yourself in life, to not lose yourself on the path, you must listen to the voice of duty. To think too much about yourself is to falter. Whoever understands this secret has the potential to live in peace. But it’s easier said than done.
I became tall and strong and Mademba remained short and frail. Every year in the dry season, the desire to see Penndo would take me by the throat again. I didn’t know how to chase my mother from my mind except by exhausting my body. I worked in my father’s fields and in those of Siré Diop, Mademba’s father. I danced, I swam, I wrestled, while Mademba sat and studied, and studied more. God’s truth, Mademba learned the holy book like no one else in Gandiol. By the age of twelve he could recite the Holy Koran by heart, while I could barely recite my prayers at fifteen. Once he had become more knowledgeable than our marabout, Mademba wanted to go to the white school. Siré Diop, who didn’t want his son to remain a peasant like him, agreed on the condition that I go with him. During those years, I would escort him to the threshold of the school, which I only crossed once. Nothing could enter into the insides of my head. I know, I understand that the memory of my mother had calcified the entire surface of my mind so it was hard like a tortoise’s shell. I know, I understand that there was nothing beneath this shell but the void of waiting. God’s truth, the space where knowledge would have gone was already occupied. So I preferred to work in the field, to dance and wrestle to prove the extent of my powers, to not think about the impossible return of my mother, Penndo Ba. It was only once Mademba was dead that my mind opened enough to let me see what was hiding there. You might say that with Mademba’s death, a big metal seed of war fell from the sky and cracked my mind’s shell in two. God’s truth, a new suffering joined with the old one. The two contemplated each other, they explained each other, they gave each other meaning.
When we turned twenty, Mademba wanted to go to war. School had put it in his head that he should save the motherland, France. Mademba wanted to become a somebody in Saint-Louis, a French citizen: “Alfa, the world is big, I want to see it. The war is a chance to leave Gandiol. God willing, we will return safe and sound. When we become French citizens, we’ll move to Saint-Louis. We’ll start a business. We’ll become wholesalers and we’ll distribute food to the shops in northern Senegal, including the ones in Gandiol! Once we’re rich, we’ll look for and find your mother, and we’ll buy her back from the Moorish horsemen who took her.” I bought into his dream. God’s truth, I owed him. And yet I said to myself that if I also became a somebody, a Senegalese rifleman for life, it could be that in the company of my detail I might one day visit the tribes of the northern Moors with my regulation rifle in my left hand and my savage machete in my right.
At first the recruiters told Mademba “no.” Mademba was too frail, as light and delicate as a crowned crane. Mademba was not suited to war. But God’s truth, Mademba was stubborn. Mademba, who to that point was only resistant to mental fatigue, asked me to help him become resistant to physical fatigue. So, for two whole months, I forced Mademba’s feeble strength to grow and grow. I made him run in the heavy sand beneath the leaden midday sun, I made him swim across the river, I made him swing a daba in his father’s fields for hours and hours. God’s truth, I forced him to eat enormous quantities of boiled millet mixed with hot milk and peanut butter, as fighters worthy of the name do to put on weight.
The second time, the recruiting soldiers said “yes.” They didn’t recognize him. He had gone from crowned crane to fat partridge. For Doctor François, I drew the laugh that sprang to Mademba Diop’s face when I explained to him that if he wanted to become a wrestler he already had an alias: Turtledove Chest! I drew, in shadows and light, how Mademba’s eyes creased with laugher when I added that he’d puffed out so much his own totem wouldn’t recognize him.